THE BLOGS

November 21, 2017

﻿Mindfulness as a tool in Manual Performance Audits

When it comes to website success, developers and site owners know their core assets and how it affects their website. At the end of the day, all that counts in user experience. Your users should not be let down by a slow, buggy and lagging website. But it is not very often that website owners and developers know every nook and cranny of their web pages. Google Analytics and associated tools help in evaluating how the website is doing online in a holistic manner through automated performance audits.

While automated audits are reliable, they miss the minute details that are picked up and interpreted by Manual Audits. People can use spreadsheets and Pie charts to create an audit report that is wholly and easily comprehensible.

The key here is mindfulness. Keep automation to a minimum and consider every element that loads on a web page. This will give you a reality check on your work on various levels. Given below are some of the steps for creation of a Manual Audit and its detail:

Gathering performance data

To kick-start the gathering of data, narrow down the exact page or pages that receive the most traffic and is the most frequently accessed. One can use WebPagetest to arrange network activity associated with a specified URL into a spreadsheet format.

Sifting through the data

Once you have collected the needed data in a CSV or Spreadsheet format, you need to further shortlist the exact data that is required. The editor to use can be Excel or Google Sheets. The data fields required would be the Host, the URL and Object Size. You can create a brand new spreadsheet using only the relevant fields mentioned above.

Auditing each asset request

You can take the reworked and shortlisted spreadsheet and add a column to designate the purpose of the Object along with a description column for convenience. Each asset can be assigned a purpose such as Ads, Analytics, Function and Content.

Mindfulness

After executing all the steps mentioned above, you should consider each asset displayed on the respective page. This will lead you to be mindful of every detail on the web page and will result in unexpected and useful insights into the web page performance.

Augmenting Your Data

You will then have to convert the data which is in bytes to Kilobytes to make it more comprehensible to people. You should use formulas to total the download sizes of the cells classified according to purpose, along with other calculations to make the data easy to understand.

Making illustrative Pie Charts with Processed Data

Next, You can use the processed excel data, along with the totals grouped according to the purpose and plot these values as portions in a circular pie chart. You can also compare data from competitors for similar web pages to do a market analysis. Irrespective of how good the results may seem, the little room for improvement can be shown here to work on by the company.

Conclusion

In the end, it can be said that Manual reports are way more useful than automated audits. This is because the nuances of web traffic can be easily captured and translated into user relatable words. This means stakeholders and employees can better understand what makes the site tick and what doesn’t. And now, they can work on what can be improved to a great extent.

Looking for a performance audit of your website? We can help! Reach out to us at [email protected]